Pedal Line Friday – 5/1 – Sam Zadgan

Today’s Pedal Line Friday submission is from Sam Zadgan. If you have a pedal line (doesn’t have to be in a board) for your rig, please email me a photo, bio, description of pedals and routing to pedalline@nulleffectsbay.com. Every Friday I’ll showcase a pedal line submission. Make sure you include any links to your band or music page.

Here’s my latest pedalboard. Not currently in a band as I’m moving countries (from UK to Australia) but will try and form a instrumental doom band when i get settled.

The board is a lot smaller than what i use to have, but i find this board covers all the sounds I need and its small and practical enough to work in recordings and live, without too much tap dancing.

The signal chain is pretty standard:

TC Electronics Polytune Mini -> CAE Wah -> Black Arts Black Forest -> Black Arts Quantum Mystic -> EQD Grand Orbiter -> EQD Hummingbird -> EQD Disaster Transporter Snr -> Radial BigShot

From the pedalboard I run a stereo amp setup, Amp 1 is a 1974 Marshall Superbass through a 4×12 Marshall cab with Celestion 75’s and is set to very clean through the low/bass input. Amp 2 is a Matamp GT1 through a 4×12 Matamp cab with Celestion hot 100’s and is set to slight break up.

The style of music I play has a lot slow and thick distortion mixed with some clean passages. The Guitars are tuned down to either B or C with P90 or Humbucker pickups. Due to the tuning I need pedals that will keep clarity whilst still being heavily distorted.

My main Distortion Pedal is the *Quantum Mystic*, because it does exactly what I need, it provides a very heavy distortion tone, with some elements of fuzz, but still maintains note clarity and is very dynamic. The EQ controls provide a lot of variety and the gain has a huge range too.

*The Black Forest* I use for more of a low gain overdrive/fuzz pedal or as a boost to my Distorted sound. Much like other Black Arts pedals its great at delivering a great bottom end and clarity that most other pedal manufacturers can’t.

On Distorted parts I rarely use anything else to colour the sound except for the *CAE Wah* on melodies or the odd solo. The CAE is perfect as it has two settings which I often switch between. For the more groovy riffs, where I might use Wah for single notes, i switch it to the red setting with maintains the low end, and on solo’s i switch to the yellow to get some cutting high end. Also the boost is always on to be a little bit above unity.

With Clean tones, I usually use the *Grand Orbiter phaser* and delay. The Phaser is a very chewy sound which isn’t harsh at all or thin on the high end…and sounds great on chords.

*The Disaster Transporter Snr* delay is an amazing delay pedal which ended my search for delays. I switch between the slight Modulation the Reverb mode, both sound amazing and the trails function is perfect for transitions between parts where one fades out and another begins. Running both modes together i can get some really great spacey ambient effects.

*The Hummingbird* again is used on certain clean parts. I wouldn’t classify it as a Trem pedal, its very choppy and the effect is much more pronounced which is perfect for slower parts which give the repeater enough time to do its thing.